Bad end to a good week

Oh my... what a mess!

This last week I've been really diving into taking an active role in the numeracy lessons - I had to plan this week which I did, the week before half term. It was supposed to be a few days of co-ordinates, followed by the start of a sequence of lessons on, um, sequences. However, in the grand tradition of all best laid plans (see what I did, there?) it had to be amended on the fly. Between by MB (my class teacher) being impressed with how much the children were enjoying the main activity on Monday and then being in college on Wednesday the whole week ended up on co-ordinates (leaving me with only three days to plan for this week... which was nice).

Wednesday was... interesting... too. Seems the game is most definitely afoot now, with a great number of fellow students starting to come under varying levels of pressure. Some personal (a big blog shout out to Darren whose girlfriend has been rather unwell), some professional (again, a big blog shout of encouragement to Helen, who had a nightmare of a link tutor visit) but above all, mostly just stressful. Plus, between Darren and myself, I worked myself up into a "bit of a twizz" about my own upcoming link tutor visit (which between us we managed to bring forward by a week). And so I came back to school, still panicked, and it took me until lunch time to realise why I was feeling so jittery and get over myself.

The maths (I think we can call it maths again, as I've just noticed that the newly launched "Primary Framework" talks about literacy and mathematics) went well - very well, actually. My interactive whiteboard (henceforth, IWB) battleships was very well received, the use of the scale map of the acropolis that we've been using (note the cross-curricular links to the history topic) was suprisingly successful and the tangrams were rather fun (only one pupil managing to actually solve a tangram before we gave them the solutions so that they could do the actual co-ordinates work).

ICT on the other hand... eep! There I was... I'd been through the actual introduction, showing the children how to use the drawing package (OpenOffice.org Draw, actually, given that it's free) and then got them seated where we wanted (for the differentiation, don't y'know) and got to the first, brief, point of the main activity - get the children to copy the relevant file from the network into their local folder ready to start work editing... and... then the lesson ended. Yup. Th-th-th-that's all folks. So, just to spell it out, I spent about 30 minutes trying to coach 29 children into copying a file from a shared folder on the network. Aargh!

On the bright side, I have a perfectly good lesson plan for this next ICT lesson; which, given that I'm being observed, can only be a good thing.

*sigh*